Wednesday, 15 June 2016

You wait ages for one, and then you explode.

I'm sure it's happened to all of us. There you are, standing
at a bus stop, and the bus is late. Late enough that you're starting to wonder if
you've missed it, and whether or not you have time to pop into the shop down
the road or light a cigarette. You decide not to chance it, and continue to
wait. Time passes. Soon you've been standing there long enough to have smoked
an entire pack and go to the shop for another. Finally, you decide that the bus
isn't coming. Your focus wavers, and just as you give up on the bus arriving
any time soon and move off- wham! There's the driver, glaring at you
impatiently through the open doors. You're caught off guard. You rush back from
the direction of the shop. You trip, drop your change. In your flustered state
you inhale your cigarette. You can't breathe. Darkness claims you.

The weight of anecdotal evidence on this phenomenon is
staggering. Perhaps not the death-by-asphyxiation part, but certainly the bit
with buses turning up just as the potential passenger fully gives up hope. So
much so that we can safely assert a causation between low commitment to
waiting, and the sudden arrival of the bus in question. It is as though any
given bus, en route to a passenger with a defeatist mindset, was compelled by
some causal law to adjust its velocity in accordance with their hope of seeing
it. This being the case, it leads us to accept that we have encountered a vital
link between Sod's Law and hard, quantifiable Physics. The intriguing part of
this concentration-based system of public transit appearance is the potential
to harness its regularity in non-transport areas. Were people at every stop on
a bus route to give up on waiting at the same moment, the bus would have to
appear at each stop almost simultaneously- in other words, the bus would have
to travel at the speed of light in order to disappoint everyone in its
catchment area. Achieving light-speed travel so simply is certainly a thrilling
prospect, but we should bear in mind the limitations of the method. We could
not use light-speed buses for instantaneous transfer of goods or mail, for
example. By definition, somebody expecting the bus to arrive somewhere with
their package would cause it to drop from light speed, to the velocity of the
cyclist trundling ahead of it. This is why, regrettably, the only foreseeable
applications of the light-speed bus are military.

In order to elaborate on the concept of the unexpected bus as
a weapon, it is necessary to emphasise the interplay between hard science and
somebody muttering how bloody typical it all is. A bus so accelerated is drawn
by Sod's Law, not the physical mathematics which make it useful. Therefore, the
eager physicist would do well to remember that their work is merely a
utilization of something which is outside of their field. With this in mind, imagine
the system of simultaneous bus-forsaking described above, which accelerates the
vehicle to the maximum possible speed. Now suppose that the bus route ends in a
ramp, so angled that the bus will land directly on a hostile country's largest
population centre. North Korea would soon stop its nuclear sabre-rattling if a
double-decker 38C left Dennistoun and landed in downtown Pyongyang at the speed
of light. As a weapon of mass destruction powered by British pettiness at minor
inconveniences, it is also unable to be manufactured by foreign powers, making
a public transport arms race impossible. With such a force under her command,
outweighing even the power of atomic weapons, Britain might once again be in
control of global affairs.

The only downside to this invention is that it requires the
death of a bus driver each time it is used. But this can be made less
distasteful with the right amount of ceremony. Just as Kamikaze pilots drank sake with
their commanders before flying to their deaths, the martyred bus drivers of
Britain might enjoy a pint with the Secretary of State for Transport before
their final journey. Considering the potential power of this weapon, and the
level of influence it would allow Britain to achieve, there should be no
shortage of patriots willing to sign up. Although it is worth considering the
payment of a generous pension to the deceased driver's family in order to
assist recruitment. Besides, it would not even be necessary to launch a bus
against a foreign power except in severe circumstances. Necessary leverage in
international politics could be achieved simply by assembling a squad of
willing drivers and keeping them on standby.

All these things having been considered, it seems obvious
that Britain is in possession of a unique super-weapon which will allow us to
exert control on the world stage in a manner which would previously have been
unthinkable. It should therefore be obvious that we have no longer have any
need for alliances with other countries, or of anchoring ourselves to
agreements where we are required to pull our weight.

With this in mind, vote Leave on June 23rd.
Britain can go it alone. We have our light-speed buses of mass
destruction.